Unofficial news and tips about Google

August 4, 2007

Blogroll Powered by Google Reader

Bloglines has a feature that lets you automatically create a blogroll from the feeds you've subscribed to. This way, you don't have to maintain your blogroll because it's permanently in sync with your subscriptions. "On many blogs, there are lists of links to other blogs. These lists are called blogrolls. You can incorporate your Bloglines subscriptions into your blog, as a blogroll, by including a small piece of HTML that loads a script from Bloglines."

Many people want the same feature in Google Reader, but don't know it's already available, albeit not in a transparent way. Because you don't want to include in a blogroll all your subscriptions, you could share a folder (in Google Reader, a feed can be placed in multiple folders). So how to convert all the subscriptions from a folder to a nice list that can be added to a blog?

1. You need to add all the blogs you want to share to a folder. This can be easily done from the settings: select the blogs, click on "more actions" and add them to that folder (Google Reader calls it a tag, but you should ignore that).

2. To make your subscriptions visible outside your account, the folder should become public. Go to the Tags tab from the settings and click on the small broadcasting icon next to your folder. The icon should become orange and the word "private" should be replaced by "public". In the screenshot below, cool-blogs is a public folder.

3. Copy the link for "view public page". It should look like this:http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/[NUMBER]/label/[FOLDERNAME]

62 comments:

I like the way google puts a folder of five to ten items on your blog, but it wasn't enough. This is excellent used in conjunction with their little things. I can keep another list of hot blogs and take them out if need be without going to another site, grabbing code and then updating the page element.

Thanks, that was a painless way to assemble a futureproof blog list. Been meaning to do that.

It isn't quite perfect though as one of the reasons to make a blogroll is the google-PageRank-points one sends from the crosslinking. This javascript won't be interpreted by the googlebot. This could be a feature or a bug, depending on which behavior you're looking for. Still, might be worth coding up quickly in PHP to do server-side.

Is there an upper limit to the length of the blogroll that can be generated? I'm experimenting with this and have a 325-feed roll that currently throws a server error when I try to generate the callback code.

thank you for this - very useful. one question: as i have my blogs in different categories i am trying to include headings before the blog list. it works with the first list but when i put in code for the others it turns up at the bottom of the list instead of the top. any ideas how to change this?

I tried this as a widget in the side bar of a WordPress 2.2.2 and it works fine. It doesn't however, work on a page... which is a bummer. I would like to figure out why, but don't have the time to figure it out. If someone does beat figure out how to make it work on a WordPress page, I would appreciate the comment being posted on here.

I really love the idea of this but I am having a bit of a problem following the last direction. Which template file should this be placed? I tried a couple different ideas and I would love it to be in my blogroll.php file - that file is super short and I can't figure out where to put the code. I know, I'm new! Thanks! Kathy

This is great. Any chance you could answer a few technical questions that the rest of the commenters weren't interested in?

This is the default JavaScript URL when a clip is created:http://www.google.com/reader/public/javascript/user/[NUMBER]/label/[tagname]?n=5&callback=jsfunc

This is the JavaScript URL your tool creates.http://www.google.com/reader/public/javascript-sub/user/[NUMBER]/label/[tagname]?callback=jsfunc

Where did you learn about this javascript-sub folder, and does the -sub have any meaning that you know of? Is is for subscriptions?

This is the OPML URL for a tag. It doesn't appear to be affected by the public/private status of a tag. I found that odd.http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/[NUMBER]/label/[tagname]

Do you know of any plans to make this a standard feature of Reader?

Also, I added a new tag today, and noticed that Reader now keeps whatever text you type in. In the past, if you typed Cool Sites for a tag name, Reader would convert it to lowercase and replace spaces with hyphens (cool-sites). Now it keeps the tag as you type it. I found this a bit annoying because I like the tags to be in the same format, so I now either have to format the tags the old Reader way, or change all my existing tags to the new format. I know, there's probably some medicine for that.

I don't know what "updated blogs" means. Maybe blogs that were updated in the past X days/hours?

You could use the other output for a label that shows the latest items. Copy the code for clips from Google Reader, customize the callback function and change the n= parameter from the URL to reflect the number of posts you want to analyze. So you'll read the latest 50 posts, add the blog titles and URLs to a data structure and make sure it doesn't contain duplicates.

this Google reader blogroll is useless without the updated funtion that Sym and Justice talks. Thats what Bloglines blogrolls does: in the blogroll list it shows first the latest's blogs to be updated, sorting them in an updated timing basis... and just the name of the blog, not the posts. Figure this as a feed but only with the blog name in it. Thats what blogrools are for, otherwise they are just a list of links, sorted alphabetical. Google is making too much noise for nothing, about this blogroll thing. Come on, guys, do the work as it as to be done... that's what we expect: updated blog lists in blogroll, please.Meanwhile, i'm going to rollback to my Bloglines blogroll's.

Thank you for your service but Unfortunately it doesn't work. In the last 24 hours I have checked it in different times and with different browsers. The same message every time:"Make sure you've entered the proper URL".

ok I am confused here, I want this blogrol to make the link who is updated on top and bold or something like this and it just show the list of my links or the subject of my links who are updated.... is there any way that I can keep the list but insteead of being in the alphabetical order be in updated order?????? please hel me.....

This was one of my very favorite features of Reader, being able to have it auto-update my list of blogs in my blogger sidebar. But now it no longer seems to work and I find this incredibly frustrating! I hope someone can find a work around. I'd hate to have to move to another feed reader just to get my blogroll working again. Grrrr!